Arts & Culture | Theater

Each generation reinterprets its family history, finding new connections and drawing new conclusions. Just ask playwright Charlie Schulman and composer Michael Roberts, who crafted “The Goldstein Variations,” a new musical about three generations of a Jewish family. Like Jon Robin Baitz’s recent play, “Other Desert Cities,” the work shows how a child’s tell-all memoir opens up fault lines within the family, as different generations join the battle to defend their respective understandings of the past. It will be performed in a workshop production beginning next Monday in Midtown.

Anyone who has seen a version of the musical “Cabaret” will recall the dazzling, provocative world of the Kit Kat Club, a fictional nightclub in pre-World War II Berlin. At the top of the show, a vivacious emcee, originated by Joel Grey, beckons us inside enticingly. “We have no troubles here!” he promises. “Here, life is beautiful.”

One of the first Jewish women to break — or crash — into vaudeville, Fanny Brice paved the way for female comics from Lucille Ball to Gilda Radner. Fans of Brice will have a rare opportunity this weekend to hear four top-notch singers pay tribute to her in a mixture of solos and duets, backed by a six-piece band. “Ziegfeld Girl: The Many Faces of Fanny Brice” runs for just five performances at the 92nd Street Y, with such standards as “Second Hand Rose” and “My Man” on the program.

Anyone who has seen a version of the musical “Cabaret” will recall the dazzling, provocative world of the Kit Kat Club, a fictional nightclub in pre-World War II Berlin. At the top of the show, a vivacious emcee, originated by Joel Grey, beckons us inside enticingly. “We have no troubles here!” he promises. “Here, life is beautiful.”

Some scars are more visible than others. In Jane Prendergast’s “Ashes,” set in the period following the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a teenage Jewish girl is caught between her mother, who disapproves of her having a baby, and her husband, a survivor of the fire who wants to start a new life. The one-act drama runs as part of Metropolitan Playhouse’s new batch of “East Side Stories,” a festival of one-act plays and monologues inspired by life on the Lower East Side.

Memory is sacred in Judaism. But can it overwhelm the present and prevent one from living? In Jon Robin Baitz’s 1991 play, “The Substance of Fire,” an irascible Holocaust survivor who owns a small New York publishing company insists on publishing only works on genocide, to the chagrin of his adult children who fear that the firm will go bankrupt. A major Off-Broadway revival, which is now in previews, opens next week at Second Stage in Midtown.